In January, he tried to shut down the CICIG altogether, and the court intervened once again to stop him. When a Guatemalan court blocked him, Morales responded by attacking the judges and briefly detaining one of the commission’s investigators. Last year, Morales announced plans to curtail the CICIG’s operations, claiming that it had engaged in “selective criminal prosecution with an ideological bias.” He attempted to cancel the investigators’ visas and suspend their diplomatic credentials. Next month, Guatemala will hold a general election, and Mack is running for Congress under the banner of an anti-corruption party called Movimiento Semilla.“The lesson we learned at the ministry was that if you want to implement health policies, you need healthy institutions,” she said.
In August, 2017, Morales announced that he was expelling the CICIG’s commissioner, a Colombian named Iván Velásquez, from the country, and Mack resigned. He began to criticize the anti-corruption campaign as a usurpation of his power, and he distanced himself from Mack’s efforts in the ministry. Morales was tolerant of Mack’s efforts at first-“he had a health crisis he needed us to fix,” she told me-but within months he and his family had come under investigation by the CICIG for campaign-finance violations and money laundering. “We went in knowing the work would be hard, and we still underestimated the force of the opposition,” she said. They accused her of embezzlement and nepotism and launched smear campaigns against her and her staff, online and in the media. His slogan was “Not corrupt, nor a thief.”Īs Mack started to remake the Health Ministry, with assistance from the CICIG, she came under attack by politicians and businessmen who had profited under the old order.
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(Pérez Molina is in jail awaiting trial Baldetti, who was convicted last year, is serving a fifteen-year sentence.) Their resignations paved the way for the election of Morales, who ran as an outsider. “It needed the CICIG to help fix its institutions.” In 2015, Guatemala’s Attorney General, Thelma Aldana, working with the CICIG, charged President Otto Pérez Molina and Vice-President Roxana Baldetti with racketeering and fraud, and both resigned. “The Guatemalan government could not clean itself up on its own,” Adriana Beltrán, of the Washington Office on Latin America, told me. Staffed with Guatemalan and international investigators, the group was founded in 2006, in an effort to root out a group of repressive state-security agencies that had formed during the civil war, which had ended ten years earlier, and it went on to help prosecute more than a hundred cases, leading to charges against nearly seven hundred people involved in more than sixty criminal networks nationwide. Mack immediately filed complaints with both the Attorney General’s office and the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, known as the CICIG, an independent anti-corruption agency overseen by the United Nations and supported by the United States. For a decade, funds in the ministry’s annual budget had been allocated for a hospital in the department of Huehuetenango, in the western highlands, but all that existed of it were the outer walls.
Public clinics were paying up to three times more for food and soap than they cost on the open market, because of inflated contracts with private sellers. She and her staff discovered more than a thousand pending requests from politicians to give various ministry positions to friends, relatives, and associates. “Within the first week, it became clear just how deep the corruption ran in the ministry,” Mack told me recently. Before taking the job, though, she extracted a promise from Morales that the ministry would be hers to run without interference. Yet years of government mismanagement and corruption had led to a public-health crisis-hospitals and health clinics across the country were short on medications, supplies, and vaccines, and preventable illnesses were spreading-and Mack felt that she had no choice. Many of Mack’s friends and associates warned her against joining his administration. Her mother, the indigenous-rights activist Myrna Mack, had been assassinated by the Guatemalan military, in 1990, during the decades-long civil war, and the country’s newly elected President, a former television comedian named Jimmy Morales, was a controversial figure among Guatemalan progressives, owing to his conspicuously thin credentials. Her background was in think tanks, not politics, and Mack was cautious about accepting the position. In July of 2016, Lucrecia Hernández Mack, a forty-two-year-old public-health advocate, became the first woman to head Guatemala’s Ministry of Health.
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